War With Hussein Not Complete In Americans' Minds

The Gulf War - one year later

A Year Later, Many Americans Think Allied Troops Should Have Finished The Job By Getting Rid Of The Iraqi Leader.

January 16, 1992|By Marcia Kunstel Cox News Service

WASHINGTON — One year after the United States led an unprecedented alliance of nations into battle against Iraq, a troubling sense of incom plete victory clings to America.

There is not the angst and anger left by the war in Vietnam. Americans hold few doubts that the enemy in the Persian Gulf War was an enemy worth fighting or that American troops acquitted themselves well.

But the land is powdered with a faint residue of bitterness that the victory did not produce better fruits.

''Yes, we should have gone in and did what we did. The only thing is we should have gone all the way - all the way in and did away with (Saddam) Hussein and his henchmen,'' said Edward Eric Rae, commander of American Legion Post 67 in One year ago today (Jan. 17 in Iraq), Americans watching the nightly news got their first glimpse of the six-week air war. That and the short ground assault that followed forced Hussein out of Kuwait - the country his army had invaded in August 1990.

One year ago today (Jan. 17 in Iraq), Americans watching the nightly news got their first glimpse of the six-week air war. That and the short ground assault that followed forced Hussein out of Kuwait - the country his army invaded in August 1990.

Despite the rout, the Hussein Americans see today is much the same - still cocooned in layers of absolute power in Iraq.

His country still is isolated by economic sanctions and is diplomatically shunned in the community of nations. But those penalties strike hardest at 18 million Iraqis who are cut off from the world and are finding it increasingly difficult to feed and care for their families. It is not Hussein who is hungry.

Then there is Kuwait, the oil barrel that the United States and 27 other countries liberated from the clutches of Hussein's soldiers. The old Kuwaiti regime returned to rule seemingly unchastened by its experience, unwilling still to adopt the values of freedom and democracy that at least partially propelled the battle on its be-half.

Since the war's end in February, disturbing revelations have mounted.

''Friendly fire'' killed 35 U.S. soldiers and wounded 72, a fact that the Pentagon hid for months, even from the families of the dead.

Add the postwar discovery by United Nations inspectors that Iraq was far advanced in building nuclear weapons, an alarming development that had escaped the most sophisticated spy network in the world.

Then arose questions of exactly how smart the ''smart bombs'' were, since so much of Hussein's enormous arsenal of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles remained, as did large portions of plants for biological and nuclear warfare. The generals had claimed so much was destroyed.

Hussein's quick and brutal extinguishing of two rebellions in March - the Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south - provoked perhaps the sharpest tang of bitterness that flavors the allied victory.

Bedrock support for the war has not eroded. Pollsters asking Americans if they think it was a mistake to get involved in the war consistently have drawn about 70 percent saying it was not.

But a series of polls asking Americans if they believe the cease-fire was ordered too soon - before Hussein was toppled from power - shows some rethinking.

In early April, when Americans were rejoicing that their troops were heading home victorious, only 49 percent of the people polled by the Gallup Organization for Newsweek said the cease-fire had come too early.

By April 22, the figure was 57 percent.

In an Associated Press poll this month, 67 percent said the United States should have continued fighting to oust Hussein.

The uneasiness shows in polls, talk shows and resolutions like the one Edward Rae heartily endorsed at the American Legion's annual convention last September in Phoenix. It calls on President Bush and the United Nations to apprehend Hussein and his fellow rulers in Iraq and to try them for war crimes - whether they are in custody or not.

Yet the objectives of the war - as stated in U.N. resolutions, by the politicians and by the generals - were clearly limited to driving Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and restoring the legitimate government.

''Our goal is not the conquest of Iraq. It is the liberation of Kuwait,'' Bush said in announcing the first air strikes on Baghdad.

Kuwait was liberated.

Analysts and scholars of international law say some other positives spun out of the Gulf War, including the rare show of international unity that was possible in part because the war objectives were limited.

Although the United Nations was effectively cut out of the military conduct of the war, its involvement overall was unprecedented, said Edward Luck, president of the United Nations Association, a non-profit group that promotes the U.N. system.

Setting sanctions and voting to use force against Iraq were strong moves, but the United Nations took its biggest steps out of character after the war: An aggressive, intrusive program to disarm Iraq and the decision to help Iraqis suffering government retaliation after the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings.